Starving Artist
New member
When I say deserve it I'm talking about people who have a right to it under the rules established when the program was set up. When you have a section of a major government benefits agency whose primary responsibility is providing for people who become disabled, and that agency deliberately adopts the practice of denying everyone initially, regardless of the legitimacy of their claim, they can't help but be denying it to people who deserve it under the rules. Their goal is to cause as many people as possible to accept that denial and give up. Presumably this is to save money at the expense of people who have become disabled and are in desperate straights. As to why this agency is trying to save money, I have no idea other than to think that it doesn't have enough to begin with. And if it doesn't have enough to begin with, it goes back to underfunding, which insofar as I know has afflicted every government social program that ever existed. Sixteen percent of the salaries of every working person in this country (save federal employees, of course) goes into the Social Security program. That should be enough to fund quite generous benefits in my opinion, and yet the typical SS retirement benefit is only $1,000 or less per month, and disability applicants are routinely turned down.
Why is that, when so much money is going to fund these programs? I don't know. Perhaps additional taxes truly are needed to make these programs work properly, but if so how high would those taxes need to be? Sixteen percent of everyone's pay for the sole purpose of funding Social Security is a pretty damn good chunk of their income, and if that is only enough to provide for the mediocre
services and payouts we have today, would thirty-two percent provide twice as much? I doubt it. But even if it did, would that be worth it? Would doubling the mediocre payouts and disablility expendures of today solve the problem? I doubt it. Benefits and care are so meager today that doubling them is still likely to provide only so-so improvement. In fact, I'd wager that doubling the SS tax still wouldn't adequately provide even for disability payments to those who qualify for them even if retirement benefits remained the same, so how high should we be prepared to go?
This is a key problem with government social programs. There simply isn't enough money available to adequately fund them because people would scream bloody murder at the amount of tax it would require. So we wind up with what we have today where people are paying sizable amounts of their income to fund programs that provide only the most meager of benefits...if they provide them at all!
Certainly there are many around this board that would be perfectly happy for the government to take ninety-five to ninety-eight percent of our incomes in order to provide some mediocre kind of existence for us from cradle to grave, but most people in this country would like to live better than that. And given that most of us feel we can do a better job of deciding how to spend our money than the government can, we prefer to keep as much of our money as we can so as to better feed, house, clothe and educate our children and enjoy our time here on Earth. Which, of course takes us back to the question of raising taxes, and the fact that the U.S. government, despite the fact that in less than a hundred years we've gone from no income tax at all to a system where nearly half of every working person's income goes to fund one government entity or another, still can't provide what it promises when it persuades people to vote to institute these programs (or when like is happening now, Congress decides to ram them down our throats whether we like it or not).
Yeah, the post office does an excellent job of delivering the mail, and just about anytime I've gone into one, the people there have been knowledgeable and pleasant and helpful. So in that case, I'll have to rescind my earlier comment that the only thing the government operates well is the military. (Or perhaps I should say it 'functions well,' as it seems to have a very hard time operating at anything but a loss.) Still, functioning well is something I don't ordinarily equate with the government services so in the case of the Post Office that's still a good thing even if it does operate at a loss.Voyager said:
Still, my experience generally with government employees, or at least the ones that one has to go to in order to obtain services, permits, records, etc. is that they are often sullen and bored, and have a pretty much take-it-or-leave-it attitude as to what you need if it falls even slightly outside the parameters of what they've been trained to provide. In other words, there's no real helpfullness, no going the extra mile to provide service, and no real indication that you are anything more than something they have to deal with in order to get their pay and superior benefits. This attitude is further bolstered by the fact that once you get hired by the government, whether federal or state, you're practically guaranteed a job for life as it's almost impossible to get fired.
Contrary to popular opinon, I have no great love for insurance companies. But I do know that based on my own personal experience and observation, people with insurance get a much higher quality of care than people who have to rely on the government for their health care. I would not be averse in the least to laws and regulations to bring insurance companies in line and to set up guidelines that they have to follow and live up to if they want to be in business. What I don't agree with is that the only solution to insurance company malfeasance is for the government solution.Voyager said:
I am very dubious about these so-called surveys showing a high degree of satisfaction with Medicare. I don't know a single person who once had corporate insurance and now has Medicare who likes it. They often can't see doctors they want to see because those doctors don't take Medicare patients; they get treated more perfunctorily by doctor's office and hospital staff; and medications and treatments are guided by or determined by what's the least expensive. The only people I've known who were happy with Medicare are people who've never had insurance and who would have nothing now without it, and like I've said before, being better than nothing is hardly a ringing endorsement of how good a program it is.Voyager said:
No, I am talking about a policy (refusing all disability applications, for those who've lost track) that is so well-entrenched and so widespread and well-known that there is no answer for its existence other than that it had to come down from on high. Here is a policy that is widely known to provide bupkus, even after forcing its disabled claimants to somehow survive for six months to a year waiting on a ruling, without first having attorneys (and their concomitant costs) becoming involved and forcing the government's hand. This is a widespread and widely acknowledged practice on the part of the Social Security administration and IMO it has to be a practice deliberately decided upon and handed down from the upper levels of that administration itself. And I think it's just accepted as S.O.P. by the politicians and presidents who become aware of it because there isn't enough funding to finance it all anyway, as I alluded to above. In other words, I think everybody in Congress and the presidency (every presidency, not just Obama's) is aware of it and that the instructions to operate this way come down from SS's top administrators.Voyager said:
Subprime mortgage brokers are a tiny, tiny sliver of the businesses that operate in this country.Voyager said:
A business's primary goal is to be profitable. And to be profitable and compete, it has to keep at least most of its customers happy. And to keep them happy, it has to give them what they're paying for. Business almost always operates more efficiently and at less cost than government and provides better and higher quality service. This is because business has a profit motive - something that government doesn't have to worry about.Voyager said:
Because they have to do what they are told by their superiors, which is to deny benefits wherever possible. I doubt they have much discretion at all as to what they allow and what they don't.Voyager said:
So in other words, you have to have specialized knowledge based on experince in order to keep government offices from making you sit in line all day and miss one or two days of work. I've never in my life experienced that kind of treatment from a private company.Voyager said:
Again, I've never had to wait like that in private industry.Voyager said:
Nope, but even if I had it wouldn't have been because I went to their place of business and had to sit on my ass for the better part of at least one day and perhaps even a second before I even got to talk to someone. And I know that most companies that keep customers on hold for an hour are doing so in order to keep their costs down and provide me with less expensive products, and that they are constantly striving to improve their customer service experince so as to become more competitive. I'm sure Apple has sold a great many computers over time because of its excellent reputation when it comes to customer service.Voyager said:
Whereas government will keep people on forever whether they are needed or not.Voyager said:
They yell because they look at how much they have to spend on taxes and how little they're getting in return, and they look at how wasteful and unaccountable government is, and the last thing in their mind is that if only they paid more taxes maybe there would be enough people there to take care of time in a timely manner.Voyager said:
Well, all I can say is that a great many conservatives and Republicans don't want more services.Voyager said: